Business founder turns attention to next generation

James L. Coyne, the new leader of Chester County Futures, knows what it’s like to become successful without having every advantage in life.

Chester County Futures is a not-for-profit poverty prevention program that gives motivated but disadvantaged young people scholarships and mentoring in academic work and life skills. The organization recently named Coyne, founder of CB Technologies and currently executive officer and co-founder of Modevity LLC, as its chairman of the board.

Coyne grew up one of seven children, with parents who both worked two jobs. Although their situation was not one of abject poverty, “I’ve seen the kinds of choices,” Coyne says, “that kids have to make early on.”

So Coyne was sympathetic when Jeremy Allen, currently the group’s chairman emeritus, told him about Chester County Futures during a round of golf seven years ago at Hartefeld. Interested, Coyne checked it out and decided to become involved.

His first contribution was to improve the golf-event fund-raising program. Coyne arranged to hold it at different venues and to ask for a higher contribution to the organization, so that today the organization gets as much as $40,000 or $45,000 a year from its golf events.

The organization has also done well with wine-dinner events, Coyne says, ramping them up so that what once brought in about $20,000 in gross income now garners about four times that much. Coyne says the organization has been successful fund raising with foundations and wealthy individuals in the area, and as chairman he’d like to increase the emphasis on corporate giving.

Coyne says he’d also like to do a “fine-tooth comb review” of the organization’s work with an eye toward “growing deep” rather than “growing wide.” There’s a nationwide focus on intervening in disadvantaged young people’s lives in their early years, Coyne says, because many of the choices that set people on particular paths in life are made in the middle-school years.

Chester County Futures helps by having caring adults form mentoring relationships with young people who have potential and are motivated to succeed but, for a variety of reasons, lack the guidance they need “in terms of making right choices for the future,” Coyne says, about school work, friends and relationships, drug and alcohol use and similar situations.

The mentor provides common-sense guidance, Coyne says, and also serves as a model and a guide, someone the young people in the program like, respect, and whose approval they want to keep. “You don’t want to let them down,” Coyne says.

Coyne says raising his own four boys left little time for actually mentoring himself in past years, but now, as an empty-nester, he’s ready to move in that direction.

“I know all about what it takes to get them ready to understand college is the way to go, and get them ready for a career,” Coyne says.

His own experiences as a parent give him empathy for other young people. One of his sons had a learning disability that made reading a challenge. Coyne was able to send him to a private school where he got the help he needed and today he’s a thriving college student. He was lucky enough to grow up in a family that could give him the resources he needed, but many children, Coyne says, need the help but don’t have families that can provide it.

So Coyne says he and the other board members will keep on reaching out into the community, helping Chester County Futures support deserving students. “It is a growing program, and we grow as much as we can,” he says, “because there’s plenty of need.”

Coyne reputation as a mover and shaker in Chester County industry dates back two decades.

Coyne founded CB Technologies, a Uwchlan-based provider of clinical electronic data capture software and related services to the life sciences industry, in 1993. CB Technologies was sold in the summer of 2003 to VIPS, a supplier of health-care business intelligence products.